


sharpen your knife

by remnantof



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Graphic Description, M/M, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Past Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Queer Het, column a and column b, is it fenris/isabela/hawke by the end or isabela/merrill?, not sexual abuse, of gore or violence, who knows - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 16:54:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3297632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Come back,” you spit instead. “He will pick a wrong side, and the city will turn on him.  When this sours, come back. Help him escape.”</p>
<p>Isabela’s smile is the flash of a fish leaping from the waves. “I suppose our lot would be a half-decent crew. I could toss the redhead overboard when she annoys me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	sharpen your knife

**Author's Note:**

> World State Notes: Purple/Blue Male Rogue Hawke; Rivalmance; Hawke isn't white but still has his stupid jam-smear across his nose and a pointy beard; sides with mages; anything else might spoil the story a bit. Some scenes in canon are expanded or completely rewritten to be something else.
> 
> Triggering content: vivid nightmares involving body horror and a past of slavery and abuse; canon-typical violence of dismemberment and heart-squeezing; character living with the trauma of slavery and sexual abuse; character remembering the abuse of a family member, non explicitly. Triggers for the game likely all apply to this story.
> 
> What you won't find: explicit scenes or memories of rape, not a lot of implications toward it beyond character's current behavior toward sex.

The heart is a house with four chambers. Smooth red stone climbing into an inscrutable dark, red runners on the red floor. In your dreams you walk its twisting halls at dusk, sconced flames pressing their glow to the walls. The floor jumps under your feet. The carpets are damp and warm.

The first chamber is empty. You spend the majority of the dream walking its rounded space, searching for any sign of use. A portrait, a scrap of food, a child’s toy. A squatter’s pile of ash and waste.

Every pulse lifts you and puts you down on the bare floor. Every beat says, remember—remember.

The second chamber wades you ankle-deep in bright blood. Rust-ruint pipes pour it down the walls, hot and stinking like a shitditch in Summer. If there are scraps to find in the flood, you’ve no stomach to reach in and take them. Blood is its own memory. Stink is its own sharp reminder.

Your fault. Closer truth to you than the Maker.

Bloody feet drag no footprints over the dark floor of the third chamber: it hangs with black banners, strung from the pitch dark to hide the walls and lay haphazard across the carpets. There is no sigil, there are no candles. Only silver marks at the edge of every long shadow, glowing for your eyes. The air is dry, with just enough chill to keep you moving. 

You haven’t found the fourth. The red halls wind back to the mansion, grey and clogged with dust. You are half-dressed and wandering the second storey, sword in hand. Your gauntlets are back in the dining room, clawed armor curved toward a wine bottle. A broken mirror catches you at a low angle, tilted beside an open window. There is the moonglow halving the shattered image; there is the green light of your eyes in your shadowed face. Your hair is wild, your blade is dipping heavy toward the floor.

You are not ready to put it down. It drags behind you in the halls, tearing the faded carpet.

-

_Siren’s Revenge_ is a belly of dark, curved wood, cutting the waves faster than its girth should allow. She stands black against the night sea, her spiked prow whistling a breeze over the deck. It slips between the rails, over the bare arches of your feet. It drags every ache from sailor and survivor off the salt-licked deck and into the sea, spits them stinging against your side. You come awake cold and exhausted, sat firm to a corner between the ship’s rail and the wall of its cabin. With a start, you twist against a familiar weight around your middle, phase through a bond at your wrist without true thought.

Thick rope still connects you to the rail by your waist, tied by shaking hands while you fought and frothed against their grip. Stunning pain from your side compels your ragged breath, which takes you back to the place of ugly fear you passed out in, which—

It’s easier to hold still, shut your eyes to the half-dark, and listen.

Wind breaking in the sails, the canvas swell and snap. Ropes groaning, a tighter sound than the wood shrinking and expanding against pitch. Leather boots and bare feet slapping the wet deck.

There is no storm overhead, but the sea pitches like a living thing. Every boat fleeing the harbor bucks and clings to its back. Disturbed from their holes in the cliffs, gulls scream in the dark.

Men and women scream from the hull, muffled but familiar as the rope cinching your armor to your burning side. The _Revenge_ fills her belly with those alive to grieve.

You are alive. Isabela could neither calm nor contain you, so it was Hawke who pressed you panicked to the corner. Hawke who pitched his brow into yours, something tender wrenched into a blow by your hysterics. You remember his grim face, blood pouring from the cut you’d broke open. You remember that he was sorry, and it sank your stomach somewhere deep and quiet to see it on both their faces. A single rope, to tend your sorry hide when they could not. Your breath seethes. You feel like a fool.

Open your eyes: you do not hear the crackle of Kirkwall’s flames, you cannot taste their heat. That was before, and you do not have to look back if you do not wish. If you grieve, it is only for how much remains the same.

A gull passes overhead, gold against the pink edge of the clouds. Either you haven’t been out for long, or Isabela’s crew needs some work. As you climb to your feet, one elbow over the rail and a surprising amount of slack on your tether, one of them grabs the rail at your shoulder, propels himself against the rolling of the deck to round your corner without trodding on your legs. His apology is a faint, whiskey gasp on the salt air. His eyes are white and wild. The brief contact rings through your markings from arm to throat. You clench your fist until the spikes of your gauntlet prick your palm, and release. 

You remember this too, lyrium singing your head sound to your shoulders: Isabela filling the gaps between salted hires with refugees, anyone with the will or wile to work. Plenty of sea legs will be earned by necessity, and you know what that’s like.

At least they won’t have to vomit with chains around their necks.

You get upright enough to rub the raw lines under your jaw. There is protest from your ribs that you can ignore, and protest from your collar that you cannot. Hand on your hip it is, with one on the rail and your face turned to the burning coast. Real heat pushes the _Revenge_ forward; real casualties remain on the coast, that you do not know and will not bury.

A deep breath. Nothing leaves you on the exhale.

-

They aren’t people, the first time you meet. Three staves and a pair of knives, the storm-scent of lyrium potions drained and tossed to the gutter. Their voices echo off the high walls of the deserted alley, and you register: three apostates, one elf, raiders’ armor, bandaged arms. The darker humans have the same thick, black hair, but it’s the woman who looks at your bloody gauntlet like _you_ might harbor a demon.

In your experience, apostates can’t be trusted to help any but their own. The raider keeps your feet steady on the packed dirt of Lowtown’s streets. His authority is easy and natural: one look to the woman and his hand swayed out from his hip— _it’s alright_.

Their honey-brown eyes flick together under rough brows. Brother and sister. The moment worms its way up your lizard brain and curls behind your eyes.

You crouch over the captain’s body, narrowing them in the privacy of your sweat-soaked hair. Their gazes itch all over your skin, cautioning you to search him the slow way, corporeal fingers untying laces and shifting armor. “So, you obviously lied to us.” When you deign to look, the curiosity is warm and open on his face.

“Why would I not?” The curiosity is warmer; you blink hard as his lip twitches at the corner. “I don’t know you. I didn’t even know there was a _you_ to lie to.”

The corner tips up, and the other. The elf bats her deceiving cow-eyes and claps both hands together, chirping and unable to deny your logic. Something about the sickle swung behind her ankles sets your back teeth tight and aching. Her vallaslin are smoke and sharp antlers framing her eyes, honoring a god you would not suffer any beating to name.

It hurts your jaw to turn your guard from her, but their leader is still smiling, even as he folds his arms in a huff. “I suppose if there are more slavers to take care of, we’re already dressed for the occasion.”

“Good,” you allow. “Meet me in Hightown after you regroup, upper courtyard.”

-

Half the night later, he wipes the blood of Danarius’ men off on his beard and braces his hand on your shoulder. It is disgusting and considerate: frustration is a tremor working from the center of the earth to your bare heels. The mansion is cold, dark, and a man is dying slowly around the point of your sword. “I’d offer to help you clean up the place—”

“But you can’t be trusted to wash your own socks,” the sister says, closing a cut across her brow with the same motion she uses to tuck her hair behind her ear. You can’t watch her and process the weight of his hand at the same time, so you shrug it off by pulling your blade from its wet, red hilt. Her brother laughs. The pale apostate squints sideways at you while you shoulder the long blade, back up several steps under its weight. You struggle not to flinch when the elf slips around your side as quick and bright as a child in the market. If you had any coin left on you, you’d check for it.

These are the most brazen, idiot apostates you’ve ever had the misfortune of crossing paths with.

“This was fun,” the raider declares, wiping a ragged red mustache on a lady’s portrait with his blade. “If you ever want to do it again, come look us up at The Hanged Man.”

You do not want to do this again. But, just in case: “If I don’t find you there?”

He smiles with his teeth. “Ask for Hawke.” When he holds out his hand, you have no beard to wipe your gauntlet on, and you wouldn’t besides. You shake it firmly, spikes digging into his flesh.

“If you have need of me, I will be here.”

-

Isabela unlocks them for you, a key to the tavern’s door you dearly need after years of watchful, sodden eyes and bounty’s strung up the walls with your own sullen face. Your pride doesn’t allow you to sit at a table adjacent to Hawke’s, drinking and watching, and you don’t like him well enough to take the empty chair. You almost don’t like Isabela, for how she is cast from the same mold. According to Varric’s ambling prologue, the Hawke patriarch was half-Rivaini, and when Hawke leans toward her and shows his teeth, they look as much like family as the girl protesting loudly at their discussion.

Still, she is not the blood mage, will lounge happily next to you at the bar when the others are late, and is the first to visit you in your makeshift home. “You helped me out of a tight spot when we met,” she says, “I wasn’t here to return the favor. And I always return the favor.”

She stares down at you, seated on the long table. When Hawke gives you that look, you worry he isn’t serious. Isabela is always, never serious. You’ve watched her laugh away too many men not to know it.

“So it isn’t my collection of fine wines that brings you through the door.”

“Hardly.” Bracing her hands on the table, she leans back and shifts her legs. Her ankle swings within your reach, and you cup the heel of her boot in your hand, just to do it. The weight sits against your palm a moment before you let go: an electric pop in your nerves reminds you of your place. You do not take a woman by hand or foot, even if she offers it to you. You do not—

“Hmm.” Isabela twists at the hip, braces again and swings her lower body over the table’s corner. Her legs spread and rest against the arms of your chair, your armor pressed to the inset of her knees. The muscles of her arms ripple and soften as she drops her weight; she gathers them up and crosses them under her breasts. Your noticing is like an itch that sits on the top of your skin but starts inside of your throat. Your noticing is the only thing keeping you from going entirely blank.

“Fenris,” she says, soft but wry.

Lift your head. Sunset gives way to firelight, warming her skin. It is safe enough to draw your hand back and cup it over her knee. Her brows lift, but not in offense. You think there is very little you could do with your hands to offend her, and the beating would be from her own two hands—she would not call the guard come morning, to drag you out and give the neighbors a show.

“Why are you here,” you ask, hand firm where it rests.

She wiggles her leg between your grip and the side of your chair, sets her hands on her thighs and leans over you. There is little left for her bodice to reveal, and you are disciplined enough to watch her face instead. “Don’t go feeling vindicated—I’ve no quarrel with mages. I just like to be alone with you sometimes.” Her hands move from thigh to chair, bracing on your bare arms. The lyrium responds, itching, deciding—what does she feel like? Still, it is a feeling, and it tells you where her hands are.

“That sounds almost more sincere than flirtatious.”

“My flirting is always, very, sincere.” What is it, your second-skin asks, this sweet and pleasant chill? It trails the slightest burn in its wake, so different from the heat in your core. Her palms rub your arms, then the feeling is gone, her grip steady on your armored shoulders.

Lick your lips. There is no further for your head to tip, the back of it ground against the wood of your chair. “You sound like Hawke,” you say, even as your hand shifts sideways on her knee, pushes an inch—two inches—onto her bare thigh. She tightens her grip on your chair, the muscles moving under your palm. Not so good as Hawke, at hiding how dangerous she is. She doesn’t really try. You understand something closer than her thighs. Something heavier than her scent: the work that made her is long done, and the carefree spill of her hair when she unties her scarf is as real as your careful smile.

You are not entirely broken. She is not entirely free. Not even her laughter, when she tosses her scarf over one shoulder and shakes her hair to its new shape. “Hawke’s been flirting with you, then?”

“I don’t want to think about it,” you admit, thumb pressed to her flesh. She shakes her knee like budging a fly. If your slow thaw interests her, it isn’t physically.

“Dear thing, I swing every way there is to go. You won’t see me disappointed.”

“I do try not to disappoint you.”

There are her teeth. There is the swell of her cheeks. “Now who’s being sincere?”

You are: standing doesn’t put you at her height, but it allows a leg around your waist, a heel dug neatly to the join of your ass and thigh. Her hands burn cool against your throat, tug hard in your hair, and she tastes strongly enough of the Aggregio that this is hardly a deviation from plan. She is everything you like about being drunk next to a fire. Her fingers find the split in your tunic and reach in to scratch the back of your shoulders. Her palms make a sharp sound when you take her by the wrists and force them down against the table. Breath whistles rough in your nose.

“I won’t if you won’t,” she bargains, muscles tightening up her arms like a warning, even as her legs wrap around your thighs and pull you uncomfortably against the table’s edge. You nod, gentling your grip.

She pulls you down with hands and legs, and you do not go blank. For moments at a time, you are safe.

-

The blood mage is propped against the barrel next to Isabela’s door, drinking listlessly from a ladle half the size of her head. Isabela has a fresh handful of cheese and bread every time she passes, plucked out of her personal quarters before she stalks back into the fray of half-learned sailors. She presses them into Merrill’s hand, squeezes her bird-bone fingers, is gone.

Hooded eyes swing to your corner. You turn away. Every inch of your skin is itching, saltwater drying as the sea calms and Isabela gains control of her ship. Your tether can’t come off soon enough, but you suspect the way it presses your armor gamy against your side is keeping something important in place. When she comes up beside you, it is not silent or quick. Her feet drag miserably against the boards. She stumbles the remaining steps, dropping a crust of bread over the rail.

“Oh no,” she whispers. You grit your teeth. “Oh no,” again, and the threat of its terrible spiral moves your hand to steady her. Her arm shakes in your grip. She feels like fever and heavy pulse, lyrium flaring blue up your arm.

“Merrill.” Your voice is flat to your own ears. The marks calm, and the trespass seems inevitable. You are lucky she wouldn’t rather your blood sustain her, and you stare at your hand on her arm. If you phased her through the rail, you wouldn’t even have to lift her to pitch her into the sea. “M’sorry,” she says, all bird-bones and bird-voice. The wolf has no quarrel with the sparrow, you think, the line repeating in an otherwise blank space until it means something. You release her.

“Here.” She holds out her wedge of cheese.

You stare at her face. “What happened.”

“The Chantry, they—”

“I remember that. Meredith was consumed: but after.” 

She drops her hands to her sides, shaken up from the ankles like a young tree. It would hurt far more, to see the others tell it. “We ran. The templars didn’t stop us at the gate, but no one on the street knew what had happened. One of them hit you so hard, you dropped your sword and couldn’t pick it up again. We had to leave it, I’m sorry—”

You’d assumed your blade stowed below, perhaps on the other side of the cabin wall. Bile crawls in your throat, and swallowing tells you the truth of it: your chest is a battered gate, near to caving. The arm you raised to her is the only one you can stand to move. You’re far from defenseless without it, but between the loss of your sword and the addition of your bruises and tether, you feel like an unwelcome version of yourself. It would be easier to phase through the hull and leave them with an empty coil of rope.

Your promise is the only thing holding your feet to the deck.

“They didn’t want to tie you down,” she says. Your nostrils flare, and you step back. You _hate_ mages. “They didn’t want to but you were hurting and angry and there was too much else they had to do to get everyone out. And they were shouting and Hawke said, he said, _I won’t lose him too,_ , and Bela said _I’m not bloody stopping you_ so they fixed you to the rail so you wouldn’t go anywhere while they ran the ship. I don’t think you were supposed to sleep, but I didn’t know how to stop you.”

“You could stop me doing very little,” you growl. She takes a great gulping breath, and the tears finally shake out of her. “Oh Fenris, oh, I’d never. Everything went so wrong but you—you must be alright. You’re just the same. Thank the gods, you’re exactly the same.”

You’re trying to spare the focus you’ll need to phase through her if she tries for a hug, backed up against the cabin wall when Isabela strides up to wrap an arm around her shoulders. She’s ashen in the face, but her eyes cut warm from your feet to your face before she turns to Merrill and shakes her. “You’ve lost more blood than anyone, and maybe that’s your choice—but it’s my ship and you _will_ eat.”

“Don’t deserve to eat. Don’t deserve anythin’. Anders—”

“You’re not Anders.”

Merrill turns her face to Isabela’s throat and moans, low and cutting. Your back presses painfully against the wall, no more space to escape them. “The tree is burning,” she wails, and you watch Isabela clutch her by one bloody sleeve, and drag her back to the cabin door. You clutch your ribs with your good arm, and think: there isn’t time for this.

But there is time for you to sway two steps from the wall, trip one step to the rail. Both hands, then. Both hands separating you from the deep, dark ocean. 

The tree is burning. Somewhere, Anders is burning too. The Gallows, the mansion, the room in The Hanged Man where you met your sister. Perhaps she is still in the city, perhaps she is choking on black smoke. Perhaps she is in the hull below, pissing into a bucket.

Breathe deep: there is nothing to let go. There is nothing sitting hot in your gut, nothing gone heavy with cold. You are alive, and very little else.

-

Gamlen’s home is claustrophobic on a good day; Isabela’s eyes shutter and make a mechanical sweep of the four walls, two doors, single exit. Merrill is tipped at the waist over Varric so he can tuck her hair back over and over; Anders is leaned on his staff at your side, hungover on demon energy or lyrium potions or both. Aveline has her shield in front of her chest like she’ll bash the first of you to tread wrong in Leandra’s presence.

It feels like everyone Hawke knows has packed into the main room, each hushing the other while Leandra cries behind the door, reliving a day none of you were here to stop. You aren’t sure what there is to say: the templars came, as they always do. Bethany joined the Circle.

Anders vibrates with his personal, but never private, rage. “This is why we should have taken her with us. We’re safer in the bloody Deep Roads than Kirkwall these days.” 

You wonder if you could pass it as an accident, tripping sideways and landing blade-first in his foot. If you wore boots, you’d step on it. “What use would we have had for you then,” you growl instead, and Isabela asks you both to shut up before Aveline has decided which of you to punch in the sternum. That Isabela shakes her head at you stings, but you understand: this is not the time.

When the door opens, you and Aveline stand almost to-attention, while the others tip their chins up to Hawke’s face. At his best, Hawke is the sun—a marker, a source of warmth, an object of worship. At present, the sun has watched his mother cry too many times in this hovel, and he is alone to do it. At present, you want to recoil from his dark face like a beating you are helpless to stop, are not allowed to look away from. Anders shifts grip on his staff to stand taller at your side, looks as close to soft as you have ever seen. Whatever you believe, the man is Hawke’s friend.

Merrill is the first to move, ducking herself under Hawke’s gaze and taking his arm. You know it hurts her when he shakes her hand away and steps around her. She’s still standing there, lips curled flat together, when the door closes behind him.

He didn’t ask her to do that, you think, feeling displaced by his absence. 

“Well,” Aveline sighs, “it was bound to happen.”

You nod absently, and Anders rounds on you like the words came from your own mouth: “Bound to happen? What, like it was Bethany’s _fault_? Like I should march up to the Gallows right now and turn myself in?”

“I’m not saying it’s _right_ ,” Aveline says, before you can growl _yes, you should_. “I’m saying it’s the state of things. If we took her with us, she’d still be coming _back_ here.”

“We should get her out, we should go tonight, and—”

“And what,” Isabela sighs. “Hide her? Ask the Dalish for a favor? Assuming we even made it out alive. She went quietly, we’d do her more harm than good.”

“What do you know if it’s _harm_ ,” Anders spits, and you take one heavy step for the door. They make your head hurt, and the second step is lighter. Shrug the weight of them off as you step into the night air, sea breeze cutting the gutter stink of Lowtown. They’ll argue for the sake of arguing, while Hawke ferrets out more trouble than his anger can surmount.

You’ve followed him through the dark for weeks. One more night—one more long, starless night.

His heavy steps dig fresh scars to Lowtown’s dirt, and when they end at the stairs to the bay, you scuff a few marks of your own. Too quiet for him not to have come this way, but the sun is shining somewhere—your gut turns you toward the alienage, and you _listen_.

Distant, or just carrying over the high walls: the scrape of blades, too quick to be a pair of swords. Drawing your sword, your bare feet slap up dust to cover their own prints. You find him outside Merrill’s home, dancing with a pair of thieves. There’s already one face down in a puddle of his own blood, and you’ve no quarrel with anyone but Anders, tonight. Covering the entrance to the cluttered square, you watch the rooftops for reinforcements while Hawke finishes the struggling cutthroat off.

You meet him under the tree, his breath heavy and ragged, sweat shining on his darkened face. He won’t look at you, chin tipped and his lashes flickering under thick brows. With the violence over, you see curtains moving in windows, cracks of light and the edge of a face. None of the doors open.

Overhead, the great oak blocks the sky with its branches. Hawke is looking up when you look down. He breathes so deep, the thick sound is nearly a word. “The only tree in Lowtown,” he sighs. You do not reach for his arm, empty as his hands appear to be. No one wears all their knives on their back, and you are not Merrill. Isabela’s kindness is no indication of what his broad hands prefer to do.

“Vhenadahl,” you say instead, keeping your natural distance. “The tree of the people. This one is well loved, well cared for. I don’t imagine that’s easy, this close to the cliffs.”

“What is it for?”

“I don’t know,” you admit. “The elves here wouldn’t either. They just exist, the way a child might slip and call her teacher _mamae_. The tree tells you when you’re in an alienage, not just the slums.”

“So it’s just a tree.”

“No.”

Hawke gives a ragged sigh, scuffs his foot back against a cooling body. At least he didn’t kick the vhenadahl. You should get him out of here, off the street entirely. Gamlen only has two rooms to pace, and you have entire halls. His hands clench at his sides several times, cracking the bones of his fingers the way a child might do to sooth their own tantrum. “You are not that well-known in this place,” you say, reaching now for his wrist. “You’re frightening the people who live here.”

Lifting his eyes, there’s less pain than you expected. His hand meets yours halfway, offered with the palm out and the fingers loose. You couldn’t put to words the difference, leading him by hand instead of wrist, but it’s as present as the looming oak.

Any one of them would take it. Any one of them would cherish the offer.

“Ugh.” Clouds beyond the branches press the air too close to your skin, spare no ache behind your eyes. Your blade drags heavy on your shoulders, and you’ve been one-step-after-another since Seheron, one-step-weary on his heels since the idol’s chamber. Hawke turns his hand sideways and the natural spread of his fingers is its own question: can you lead, even for one night?

You strip one gauntlet and take his hand. He deflates, knocks you shoulder to shoulder and finds his feet. “It is a very long walk,” you promise.

-

The mansion is largely how you left it before the expedition, a new layer of dust settled over the old. Hawke walks up to your table by the empty fireplace, bumps into it with a grunt and hauls himself up to sit on the edge. He needs sleep.

You toss your gauntlets at his hip and lean your sword against the mantle. “I have chairs—and beds.”

“I’ve been walking for two weeks,” he groans, sprawling across the table’s width. What would he do—what would it mean—if you reached up to undo the buckles of his armor? Your fingers are all but numb from the cold burn of his hand on your markings. 

“Shall I carry you?”

He lifts his head: “ _Would_ you?” 

Snort; drop your hand and walk away. There’s a bookcase across the hall where you’ve taken to storing bottles of wine, easier to reach than the cellar when the sun sets and you’re wanting for another. You fetch three, and for all his whining you find Hawke raking the old coals to flat ash in the fireplace. “Colder in here than the tunnels,” he says, wrapping his free hand around the bottle when you offer it over his shoulder.

“Is that why you’ve saved all your complaining for right now?” The hard edges of your chair are familiar and welcome, your legs aching when you stretch them out to the table. Setting one bottle on the floor, you phase the cork from the other. 

Hawke pulls his free with a lock pick and tosses it on the broken pieces of furniture you keep for firewood. “I think you might have lied about the beds.”

“Mattresses,” you alter, your dismissive hand lifting the bottle to your lips. When the fire pops and hisses to life, he feeds it another chair leg before coming back to the table. Instead of sprawling, he rests on the edge with both feet stretched to the ground, watching the fire grow as he drinks. It catches the glass edge with yellow light, reflected softer on his face. His hair is blacker than pitch, laid almost neat under its unwashed weight. When he’s still, when he’s quiet, he’s just a man. You still can’t look away.

He leans harder into the table, hand holding its edge. “She writes to us. Mother has several letters already,” he says, low and tired. “It isn’t like she’s died, it’s just—”

“She isn’t here,” you finish.

“Yes. She’s never not been here before. We worked so hard to keep her safe, made sure she didn’t go out alone. Now it’s down to the three of us, and she isn’t here.”

You pull your feet down and lean forward, bottle set on the table and one hand across your lap. He sounds steady, but his posture keeps slipping, his knuckles white on the table’s edge. “But she’s safe now, no more running and hiding. Even if you got her out, she couldn’t stay with you. She couldn’t stay in Kirkwall.”

After a long draw from the bottle, Hawke turns his head, not quite looking at you. His eyes connect, but it’s too dreadfully calm, too much like defeat. “I know you believe it’s the best thing for her, but I don’t. All it takes is one bad templar, and I’ve seen as many of those as you’ve bad mages. She’s my sister, Fenris. I love her.”

Again: the stab behind your eyes, the shiver all over your skin. Ignore it. “Bethany can handle herself.”

“She’s never _had_ to. We’ve always been there, I’ve always been there. This is the one time that I wasn’t.”

“And she handled it,” you argue. “She didn’t get herself killed, she didn’t get you or your mother thrown into prison. She’s made no attempt to escape.”

“So I leave her to rot?”

“It isn’t your job to look out for her anymore, it’s your job to support her decision.”

He sighs expansively, blustering air through his mouth and grinding it in his throat. His hands give up, prop the bottle at his hip and brace him to sit on the table again. The fire is licking steadily at chair legs and four-poster frames, splintered in drunken fits. He doesn’t have to know you’ve still plenty of firewood stacked in the kitchens. Hawke sighs again, small and tired. “You sound like Isabela.”

“I—” you start, drawing the bottle back to your lap. It hangs against your thigh, a point of smooth pressure against your leggings. “I rarely disagree with her, these days.”

“So we’ve noticed.” He stares at you. He turns at the waist, leans his weight on the dark green bottle, and stares. “I wish we disagreed less.”

Look to your hands: bare and numb on your lap. It is cold, in your home. It is late to be drinking. You should say—I’m sorry about your sister—but it would be safest to lift the bottle and hold your tongue. But the empty hand lifts first, high enough to scrape across the table. Where he touched the lyrium, it burned—but the rest of your hand was simply warm, gripped and guarded in his blunt fingers. Leaning down on one elbow, he grips you again, a warmer defeat pinking his face.

You squeeze his hand, once: “I wish that as well.”

-

The heart is a house with four chambers. Only the deep black of drunken excess keeps you from walking its halls, and there’s no time for drink between pulling Hadriana’s heart from her chest and falling asleep in Hawke’s bed.

Your body is tired even in the dream, moving stiff between the pulsing walls. The deep, red light throbs against your eyes, builds a stabbing pain at the back of your skull. Like a blade shoving from the top of your spine to the middle of your brow, dagger-length and burning with the touch of blood-magic. It sets your markings aflame, every step flaring blue against red. Every step an echo of the agony that made them.

You remember that much, if distantly. “It hurt,” you can say, or “It was unbearable, unlike any pain you can imagine.” Not even Varric has asked you to describe it in any more detail.

Tonight, it feels closer to truth. A dull burn building as you approach the first chamber, a persistent and terrible itch when there are sight and sound where you expect emptiness. The room is bright with open sun, objects that shift the mood like scattered clouds when you take them in hand. A cloth bag sprouts tall grass across the meaty floor, the gold-white waves of Seheron’s plain. Your mother has it slung across her back and shoulder, her dark hair cut inexpertly back from her hard face. The bag barely holds you anymore, and she has both arms tucked under your weight. Beside her, your sister has red hair, pale skin. There was a man—

You pick up an apple, and the grass is flat-packed earth, the dusty market where the three of you were sold. Your mother is holding your other hand hard enough to hurt, your sister whining and pulling against her grip. She does not cry, even when the men tip silver coins into the red-haired man’s palm. It’s less than he was promised, but the slaver cuffs him on a pale, sharp ear, and tells him he’s lucky they don’t put him in chains on principal.

You tread on a doll, and there is a dusty courtyard and a house larger than the one you had on the plain, though you do not own this one. Your sister is playing near the well while you drag the bucket up and up and up. Yesterday she would be taken to the cold cellar and left overnight for ignoring her chores, but today the master has given her a doll and left her to the sun and fresh breeze.

“Why aren’t you helping,” you ask, climbing the edge of the well to drag the bucket off the hook and fix an empty one in place. You are not yet tall enough to do it with both feet on the ground, but she is. She is tall and filling out a dress that once belonged to the master’s niece. 

“I am helping,” she says, hardly looking up from her game. “I’m a woman now, I don’t fetch the water anymore.”

“Then what do you do?”

“Grown-up things, Leto. Things where I can ask them not to beat you when you’re in trouble. But I won’t if you keep bothering me.”

“Alright.”

You drop the bucket to the bottom of the well, the sound smacking the vision apart. You are just a man in black leggings, with empty hands and bare feet on the damp carpet.

In the hall, you drop to one knee. _I won’t,_ , of all things, beating around your head in her voice. _I won’t, I won’t, I won’t._ And she didn’t, because she had a fury you didn’t yet know. The knife burns cold through your skull, a splitting pain that sets fire to your skin. They’d started from the extremities, your vulnerable fingers and toes. Blood magic pricking every calloused fingertip and etching down to the bone. You told yourself you wouldn’t scream. You told yourself a lot of stupid things.

The second chamber is knee-deep in fetid blood and gore, harder to move through than ever. Hands wrap around your ankles, brush your calves. Between the pipes are black spikes, driven through the walls at sharp angles. At the end of every spike is a severed head, elven and hideously young. Eyelids drawn like curtains, mouths tipped open. Their ears have been cut and nailed to the tongue, no matter Danarius’ promise of a warrior’s burial.

Remember, the walls pulse. _Remember_.

You fall twice, blood and viscera splashed up your arms and chest. The taste of it on your lips makes you gag, has you crawling-swimming-stumbling away from their faces. 

You did this.

You fought for the right, made yourself a blank canvas for him. Your sister never spared you the beatings and they’d made you perfect, made you hungry to fight back. They couldn’t punish you for fighting back, when it was only another knife-ear and Danarius watched. There was no kinship, there was no mercy. Every fight was a pair of blunt objects coming together until the weaker of them splintered. And you were never the weaker.

You told yourself you wouldn’t scream. They tended you with healing magic, closing cuts, erasing old scars. “He must be flawless,” Danarius instructed, “not a single mark.” This was purely aesthetic, he allowed you plenty of marks in the years after.

Bloody and spitting, you take one, two knees in the dark of the third chamber. They got to your second knuckles, the sensitive skin on the arches of your feet, and you didn’t stop screaming until the last blade caressed the bottom of your lip. “Leto,” he’d asked, and you gave no reply. Days later he took you to the window, to watch your mother and sister leave through the main gate. You watched a smith fitting horseshoes instead. You asked him how the nails didn’t hurt. “We can’t know if they do, unless the horse kicks. None of my mounts kick by the time they are fitted with shoes.”

The pain ebbs from your body. The room is dark and cool as ever, the hangings soft under your hands. No amount of blood has ever stained them, the silver lines shining between your fingers. 

There was no peace in his household, but there was order. There were only the consequences you knew, and if he had never abandoned you, you might never have run at all.

You did this. You fought for it.

Hawke rolls away from you on the bed, the draft against your back stirring you from the dream. In the moment before you open your wet eyes, you can remember it all. You can hold onto the shape of your mother’s face, the red of Varania’s hair when she walked out the gate. When you open them to the banking fire, stare blankly at the licking flames—every image dulls to soft ash. The blade pulls from your skull, dull pain like a hangover and now—now you shake.

-

You remember this much, as you tell it to Hawke: it is all your fault.

-

Hawke mounts the stairs before first light, the clap of his boots ringing off-rhythm from the crew. You crack one eye open to watch his approach, your sleep superficial in the cold air. Sitting against the cabin wall eases the pain in your chest, sharpening the ache of your shoulder to cut fore in your mind. Armor must be the only thing to spare you a broken collar, and you can almost remember the blow—a shield no wider than your chest, thrust in at an angle. The templar had _tossed_ you, and you wonder if Meredith hadn’t shared her red lyrium among the ranks. Isabela invited you inside, but the blood mage smells like sickness and dried gore, and the salt air stings just-right when you suck it through your nose. 

Keep breathing, one after the other. The rope around your waist and the chestplate strapped tight make it bearable to be awake, though you’d prefer a hard drink to pour on your bloodstains and chase the cold air down your throat. Your leg twitches, once, twice, before you set your head firm to the wall and commit to consciousness.

Hawke has one hand on the rail, guiding him to your corner. The sea is calmer now, shifting the deck gentle as a courtly dance. He likely wasn’t lying about being a terrible pirate, but his balance is impeccable: his feet straying their adjustments beneath him with careless grace. He would dance through a boarding party right next to Isabela, four blades flashing in tandem. You could very much live to see it. You could ask them for a demonstration.

They’d share a look before offering a private show, and you wonder which of the barrels contains something stronger than stale water.

“Bethany says she sent someone to tend to you,” he says, prodding your hip with his boot. You swat his ankle with your good arm, still wince when the motion pulls the muscles across your chest. You lay it across your lap. Your elbow hides the blood-soaked ropes holding your side together. He stares at the coils he can see, your clawed gauntlets resting gently on their length. “She mentioned you might turn him away.” 

You grunt: “Don’t know him.”

“Yes, obviously, and mother did always tell me not to take life-saving healing magic from strangers.”

“Hawke.”

He drops his quip and his gaze. A dying elf in the darkest hour is too serious by half, and he looks away with his tongue clicking the back of his teeth. He held you down, you think. He held you down in the dark and tied you to a rail like a stupid, wounded animal. You could bleed out just to fucking spite him.

You grind ire in your throat. You had been disarmed and bashed in the chest, you were spoiling for a fight. He’d looked you in the eye at the Gallows, drawn you close and promised not to die if you promised it also.

“I’m not angry,” you say.

“You’re a dreadful liar,” he answers.

“Nearly as bad as you.”

Hawke shakes his head, until his chin catches the breeze and hangs his stare out over the water. “There are a lot of wounded. I’ll send her up at dawn, she needs some sleep.” You stare at the black blood dried on the side of his face as he turns the other way. Wary as you are, it’s pleasing enough to watch him lean his elbows on the rail and stretch out his legs. Like this is another odd adventure, and you’ll be home in two weeks playing Wicked Grace ‘til the sun finds you hungover, broke, and down to your leggings.

Thank the Maker it isn’t: he snores disgustingly when he’s drunk.

-

Grass curves against your back, slaps against your side with the wind. You wake to shrieking crows and early light, Isabela tangled against your chest. Even her fever-warm skin has a chill at this hour, and she growls when you roll your back onto the bare dirt. The tall grasses bend and fold around you in a nest, a ways from the main camp. You are stripped to your leggings and Isabela is on top of the bedroll, naked and clutching her tunic across her chest. A bandit’s coats is stuck to the back of your shoulders, and you slit your eyes to watch the tips of grass meet and break against the brightening sky.

Isabela gives no sign of waking. It would be an accident to come across her in such a wide field, but you really must get up and see safety with your own two eyes. 

Standing lifts you into a pink Summer morning, the sun casting golden across the grass. The bandits of the Planasene Forest drew you to its western edge, out into the rolling hills separating the trees from Cumberland. Hawke had declared camp among the straggling trees, and after injuries were tended and Varric’s cooking swallowed down, Isabela had led you around the first hill and pulled you into the grass. “Look at all those stars,” she’d said, biting at the skin just below your navel and setting eight fingers in the hem of your leggings. You’d looked through a you-shaped hole in the grass at a sky the same blue-black as her hair, more entranced by the depth of color than any star. When you told her so, whispering face-to-face on the bedroll, she’d rubbed your ear between thumb and forefinger and gently laughed.

“You can be so predictable, did you know?”

“You wouldn’t have so many questions for me were that true.”

Shrugging the cracked leather from your back, you drape it over her side. Your tunic goes over her legs, and you set her daggers beside her curled hands. A once-over, you stoop again to move her hair over from the dirt, stroke several weeds free of the curls. Beautiful. As safe as you can leave her.

You set off around the hill with nothing but a knife from your belt. The sun is an old comfort on your skin, made new by friends who let you bare it with a smaller lump of dread in your gut. No excuse for complacency. There might yet be bandits fleeing the woods, or slavers keeping off the Imperial Highway. Danarius yet lives, far off as the threat feels in such sweet weather. Breathe deep, the sharp scent of the grass and little else.

The makeshift camp rings with the scrape of Aveline’s whetstone over her blade. Her hair is a flame above the golden stalks of grass, her armor catching the rising light. A trail intersects your path through the grass, crushed stalks trailing out to you and turning to the north. You can’t imagine Varric or Anders wandering anywhere right now, much less your general direction. The idea of finding Anders at the end of the trail, whining to whatever fauna he’s chosen to piss upon, flares your nostrils like a bad smell. Aveline looks up, not quite in your direction, but you call no greeting before following the path to the northern hill.

Your long legs relish the stretch of a climb, burning pleasantly by the time you find Hawke at its end. Limned at every edge, he stands several feet down the opposite slope in nothing but his breeches and a short tunic. He is almost a real leader, in this light. He is almost someone to take seriously. You come up behind him, and Hawke turns, unhurried, to smile at you.

“Somehow, I knew it was you.” It uncurls something hopeful in your chest, to hear him so pleased. Hawke lifts his eyes with your frame, draws them back down as you come to stand at his side. He is a surprisingly short man, not much taller than you or Isabela on level ground. The people expect more of their hero, and you cannot say you are never disappointed. The knife remains in your hand, blade tucked parallel with your arm. It can’t be visible to Hawke at this angle, no matter how long his eyes linger. He is _looking_ at you, at you barely dressed and rolled through the grass with a very dear friend—and it isn’t so heavy as you feared. The knife remains, all you need to stand at his side and face the morning.

“Who else would be awake, at this hour.”

He grins: “Aveline’s awake, and I’ve never seen you out before noon.”

“You have now.”

“I have now.” He is incredibly pleased with himself, and you are—not irritated. It is too nice a morning, too peaceful to stand in the warming air with him and watch the sun breach the coast. You do not have anything to say, but you do not want to leave, either. After several moments of silence, you tilt your gaze at his profile to find him still smiling, almost a grimace as he brisks his hands over his arms. The dark hair on them stops at the elbow, just-visible under his arm when he crosses both over his chest. Not uncomfortable, then, just cold. You wish you had anything on to spare.

“I used to camp with my father, you know.” He squints against the sunlight, sucking air between his teeth. You tap the tip of your blade against your arm, one-two, focused on the scar dividing his profile. “Mother hated it, said there was no point exposing two children to the night air when we had a perfectly good house. She was right, one of us always caught a cold. Usually Carver.”

Carver died before you met, but he says it as though his brother’s constitution is a known. “Still, we always wanted to go again. Father was the only other mage Bethany knew, so he’d dote on her at home. Camping was different. I would get up so early, just to be awake with him for awhile, with nobody else.” The red slash flashes whole when he turns his head, catches you looking, holds your gaze. He’s looking again, but not at the width of your shoulders, the curve of your back. It’s a kind of looking that asks you not to look away. “It meant so much to me, to have that bit of him for myself.”

If the thought of intruding occurred, his steady stare and unguarded smile rebuke it. “I assure you, that isn’t why I’m awake.”

“You can always have me to yourself, you only have to ask.”

The blade taps against your arm, one-two, one-two. The gravity of this moment is illusory, and if you wait it out, he’ll lapse into some terrible joke. He’ll turn from the sun and walk down the hill, leaving you to follow his path through the grass, split away and return to Isabela. It would be easier if he just grabbed you, but nothing in your body _wants_ that, and nothing of its language can tell him what to do. You are standing rigid on a hill at sunrise, blade tucked to your wrist, and you can’t imagine he’d brush your hand with his own. 

You could roll Isabela down the slope and she’d find a way out of her clothes by the bottom.

“I don’t remember having a father,” you say, just to say _something_.

Hawke shakes his head. Maybe you are predictable. “I thought you didn’t remember anything.”

“I don’t, not really.” He turns his head, releasing you to do the same. You squint into the sun, its rounded edge balanced perfectly on the horizon. “You and your sister, though. You and Leandra. When I see it, it makes sense. Your father being gone, that makes sense too. It doesn’t feel the same when you talk about him, but I can’t say what it means.”

When you give in to the sting of your eyes, he’s smiling at you again. You frown. “It’s just a night thought,” he says, “that’s all.”

“That I’m a bastard on top of being a slave?”

“That you have a mother and sister, somewhere. That Bethany makes sense to you.”

Your frown deepens. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

-

As the sun rises, you aren’t the only pair at the rails, breathing the salt-clean air. He sits cross-legged at your knees, passing a waterskin to your good arm. You swallow carefully against the pain in your chest. “Just water,” he sighs, taking it in-hand and lifting it back to his lips. “I’ll be a good provider in the future, I swear.”

Your snort makes you aware of a bruise below your left eye, the slightest pressure on your nose and cheek. “Something besides entertainment?”

“So you _are_ entertained.”

“I must be.” The water is cool and clean in your mouth, a permutation of the night air. You want to drink it forever, until you are heavy and sick in your armor. Until you sink through the wood and bodies into the dark. Sleep, you think—what you’re longing for is real sleep. Bethany will be on deck soon, will take the weight from your chest. You wonder if you can drink enough water to fill the emptiness her existence provokes. The truth of Varania tainted whatever understanding you tricked yourself into possessing: she reminds you of him and you feel nothing. She is all he has left, and you feel nothing. The absence of your hate is so inadequate, so hard to look at him and speak aloud. _I have my own sister to hate. I don’t hate yours anymore._

You are so tired. The water sticks in your throat, so you hand it back. “At least I finished all that wine.”

“You had six years. And help.”

“Give me my victory,” you whisper, and he ties the skin to his hip, shifts sideways to crowd you, very gently. 

“You’ve never given me mine.”

“When you finally turn into a dragon, perhaps.”

He isn’t touching you, but you still feel his body shake with laughter. “Baby steps, Fenris. Hoard a bunch of old treasure. Burn down a city. Sit on a load of giant eggs—”

“Hawke.”

This time, he holds your gaze. He opens his mouth to reply, then closes it. About to say your name like a contrary child, you have no doubt. You have—you—

You doubt. “Hawke, why did you kill him?”

-

“Can you really not see his point, though? I understand your fear of mages, but you’ve been with us to the Gallows. The Circle, Tranquility—” Hawke frowns deeply, worry-lines cracking his brow. He’s followed you home again, after you walked out on Anders arguing his case to a table of disagreeable patrons. It’s just your luck that The Hanged Man’s personal templar is so addled by lyrium-addiction he hasn’t noticed that no fewer than six apostates frequent the tavern at a given time. 

“Bethany would never be made tranquil,” you assure him, the words leaving your mouth before it occurs that you believe them. The Aggregio will do that, you suppose, sliding another bottle to him. “And not every Circle is Kirkwall’s.”

“Not every mage is Danarius,” he counters. He is forever pursuing arguments he shouldn’t, when you drink together. “Not every mage is even Anders, if you really want to lower the bar.”

You do. Anders talks between his teeth at the blood mage despite already harboring a demon, and you have wondered if Merrill’s pointed ears have anything to do with it. His condition only feeds her naiveté, positing the ludicrous idea of neutral, compassionate spirits. None of them seem to remember that Anders was once a warden, and no warden truly escapes the blight. Anders blusters and kicks against the system, but never says it— _I will die young, and painfully_. That is the only part you can understand, his most compelling argument for his freedom.

Even then. Most apostates die young. “Would your sister have died, rather than join the Circle? Do you think even Anders would die to avoid it?”

Hawke pauses his bottle partway to his lips, sets it back on the table. A proper fire, with proper wood, burns bright at his back, leaving his face in blue shadow. You should find your legs to light some candles, but the half-light suits you just fine. “Would any of them fight the templars to the death,” you say again, “just to avoid the Circle?” 

“Anders would just break out. I’m surprised he hasn’t got himself caught just to help a few more apostates through the tunnels.”

“I would die.” You punctuate the statement with a drink, cool wine burning through your center. “Every time the hunters come, I am ready to go down fighting. I cannot give them my sympathy when Meredith is the face of their enemy. He fear is what I understand most.”

“Do you really feel that way,” he asks. “Even now?”

“Even now? What’s changed?”

“You have friends, now. I look out for you.”

“I would hardly call us friends, Hawke.”

That you’ve wounded him is another reason to drink: Hawke is his most forgiving when you hardly register the slight. You’ve apologized so many times for ungratefulness, it feels worn to rags and you—aren’t sorry, this time. You are not sorry for disagreeing with Anders. You are not sorry for pitting your wariness squarely against how Hawke handles him. “I guess you wouldn’t,” Hawke says, rolling the bottle on its bottom edge. The glass makes a curved ringing against the table, no louder than the pop and roar of the fire. “I don’t believe you though, so it’s alright.”

“That we aren’t friends?”

“That you’d give up like that, that you’d die. Death isn’t freedom, and that’s what you really want.”

He settles the bottle, held down against the table and closer to full than your own. You seeth, sip, swallow: stop. “You have no idea what I want.”

-

Isabela never pulls away from you, even when you pull away first. Lost and staring at the edge of the mattress, her juices drying sticky on your chin, voices rising from the tavern below. Her room is as clean as Varric’s, if not as spacious, and you kneel on a surprisingly plush rug. Your knees sit at opposite angles from your hips, your legs splayed out from them in an untidy sprawl. So much noise, blurring in your ears. The scent of her all around, and her knees folding over the bed to pull her upright. You see it, but not in any way that matters.

Her hands are warm on the sides of your head, tickling the tops of your ears. Her lips are soft on your brow. She smells like sweat, tastes salty in your mouth. Always salt, almost to the point of unpleasantness.

You have had worse. “Ring the bells,” she almost sings, low and soft against your brow. “Ring the bells, for the bitch is dead.” She is not Hadriana, and you are back in The Hanged Man, starved for all that salt.

“Sometimes it’s good to take a break,” she agrees, placing her hand back on your head and squeezing your hair between her fingers when you push between her thighs. She holds herself at the knee, holds herself so that you are just a mouth that sucks and breathes and sucks, just a pair of ears that drink in her hissed approval. You stab your tongue inside of her and wrestle your leggings down with both hands, stroke yourself back to hardness and almost, almost can’t get up.

She pulls you by the shoulders, insistent now. Her mouth opens and she is all crushed dark lashes and bright teeth when you stroke into her, shallow for as long as she can stand it. Her legs come up around your waist, her foot hooked in the hem of your leggings where they catch on your thighs. Hawke was tighter, his body harder and all the more demanding. A challenge to be faced, until something broke and all you could find was a terrible gentleness and humor. He’d laughed at everything that felt good, barked a different laugh at everything that hurt and told you to keep going. “I love you,” he’d said, smiling hugely at your hesitation when the rough edges of your armor had left bruises on his chest. “I love that you’re like this, it’s fine.” Everything was fine. Stealing his favor was fine. Walking out on him was fine.

“Bite me,” you plead, bracing an arm next to her head. She is just as muscled, but wet and open, hotter than a furnace. When she bears down with her hips, a plate of bone crushes you against the mattress, deliciously rough. “I want to stay right here. I want—”

Hawke is most forgiving when—

Your fault, it’s your fault—

Isabela sets her teeth to your wrist and hangs on like a starving dog, hands so tight in your hair and all you see is white.

-

Walking to his side of the upper courtyard feels automatic, like the tail end of your dreams—suddenly, there are familiar walls, and your armor is on, and the moon is rising over the high walls. Your hands are empty, your sword sheathed, but present. Another corner would put you at his door, but turning it finds him standing at the ready, Anders’ hair and feathers catching light from the windows. Ducking back around the corner is truly automatic, your feet parted to turn the other way and senses straining to track their movements.

No footsteps follow, no wondering voices lift in your direction. They are speaking, almost too conveniently, of you. “I want him to look me in the eye and say it again, say _all mages_ one more time,” Anders spits, “when I was right there with you and Isabela killing shades so he could betray that woman in the end.” Bile crowds your throat, loosens, slides a bad taste across your tongue. Irrational as the feeling seems, you lift a hand and ready it on the hilt of your sword. “I’ve saved him from slavers three times now, and why? He’s a rabid dog, Hawke, I know there are reasons but I don’t care. If they come for him again, I don’t see why we should—”

“Anders, Maker help me, if you finish that thought you will never darken my doorstep with your presence again.” A soft click might be Anders’ mouth finally closing. You are not angry. You are as close to understanding the abomination as you have ever been: you have warned Hawke in many of the same words about the danger of trusting mages.

“She was a slaver,” Hawke continues, “one of those reasons you don’t care about. She tried to bargain for her life with the existence of his family, something she could have freely given in the past.” The breeze picks up through the empty courtyard, tickling the red favor against your ear. It is too soon for you to be here, too soon to hear yourself so thoroughly defended. _It’s fine_.

You swallow thickly, the sour taste lingering. “You think I didn’t defend you, defend my whole family the night we all met? I stick up to him for you, but those caves were no place to argue. That woman was not someone to bargain with.” Hawke’s voice softens: “You have to understand, when he says those things—if you really wouldn’t deal in blood magic or slaves, then he’s not talking about you. He’s talking about people who hurt him. Do neither and he will come around, I’m sure of it. But do not ever suggest to me that we give up: I will not leave any of you to your fates.”

-

“Is that what you were doing,” you ask the side of his face, Hawke still looking to the prow. The sun is rising on the horizon, just a rough glow around the ship’s edges. “Or was it his betrayal?”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“I know.” You take shallow breaths while you watch him, to keep your face still, to avoid an inopportune wince. His reasons are his own, but you would like to hear them. Six years, he’d said. Six years you’ve trailed in his wake, guessing, assuming. You trust him like his worth has a scent, a taste you scrape against your teeth.

Fresh bread is warm and crisp, and Garrett Hawke is a good man. After six years, you believe it, even if you don’t _know_.

You’d like to, after last night.

Sliding his body sideways against the wall, he tips his head to it, studies what he can make out of the wood’s grain. His legs are a loose tangle next to yours, his boot butting against your calf. You would not part from it for anything, right now. A lifetime ago, you might have given him your hand, to see those eyes wander so dark. “Aveline’s husband had been tainted by the Blight when we fled Lothering. The pain was killing him already, and the Wardens were lost, scattered. Aveline couldn’t do it, or—she couldn’t do it _soon enough_. I stepped in. I don’t know why she ever spoke to me after.”

“She forgave you.”

“Not really. Not for a long time.”

“Merrill will forgive you.”

He sighs. “Maybe.”

“I suppose his demon _was_ an incurable disease—”

His eyes still your tongue, cutting over his grimace. What you feel about Anders has always been more solid than what he does, never more complicated than earnest dislike. He got your hackles up, and they never came down. It didn’t make him less than a person, it just made him one you couldn’t, with every sense in your body, trust. “That isn’t it,” Hawke says. “Anders was a healer, it wasn’t only about Justice.”

You grunt some small acknowledgment. “He thought he was breaking a bone to set it right.”

“ _Yes_.” The word breaks out of him, charges the hair against your arms. The space between you is so small, so private despite the open deck. The rising light. “But he lied. He always lied, because he never trusted me. I was his friend, but he never trusted me.

“I killed him because it was the first thing he asked me to do honestly. I killed him because he trusted me to do it if he asked. I killed him because I didn’t want any of you doing it for me.”

In a pink patch of sun, Hawke is just a man. There is a scar across his face and blood dried on his brow. There is blood worked into every buckle and edge of his armor, seeped up under his nails, worked into his knuckles and the lines of his palms. If you scratched your nails through his hair, it might flake off with the bits of dry skin. If you kissed him, you might taste it in his mouth.

“Not one of us would have gone against your decision, whatever it was.”

“Even you?”

Your voice is rough: “Especially me.”

-

She is leaving, and you cannot ask her to stay. It is not in either of your natures, and less for her feet tread so long on solid ground. The sea will have her back, and the more time Hawke spends with the Qunari, the more she ebbs away. You catch her wrist at the door of her room, her other hand on the door’s handle. She’ll pull it closed, and that will be the end. Holding it careful in your gauntlet, she twists until the metal bites, cold and bright against the warm color of her skin, and you gentle it for her. It doesn’t not matter how gentle the tether is, she is not enough like you to abide. Nothing in her has ever _wanted_ to submit.

The Qun would destroy her. You let her slide her arm back in your grip until she is touching your palm against your own. “I would ask you something,” you say.

“Well, whenever you feel like asking, I would hear it.” Her tone is light, but she sets two fingers just-so to your wrist. Perhaps she seduced certain lords with such demure precision, some manner of their ladies performed by their idea of a wench. Except, she is not just the idea—she is, truly, her own definition of the word.

“You once offered a place on your ship, when you gained one.” Her brow raises, one finger tapping between the splitting lines of lyrium. It sends the faintest shock down your arm. “This is—”

“I know you won’t leave him.”

“There is nothing to leave,” you say hotly, but her finger taps again, and you swallow it. “Come back,” you spit instead. “He will pick a wrong side, and the city will turn on him. They don’t want a hero, they want someone to make the decisions so someone can be blamed. When they blame him, when this sours, come back. Help him escape.”

She closes the door, freeing a hand to tuck your hair behind your ear and cup the side of your face. “You still love him. You always did and I always knew.”

“Yes,” you say, because it is her. Because it is true. “And I love you, and I know love will not make you stay, but that is not what I ask.”

Isabela’s smile is the flash of a fish leaping from the waves. “I suppose our lot would be a half-decent crew. I could toss the redhead overboard when she annoys me.”

She taps her finger against your wrist, one last time.

-

The heart is a house with four chambers. A hole in the wall of a single room will drag storms through a mountain keep, and your hand can penetrate stone if you will it.

The heart is—you hold all four of them in your hand, Danarius’ eyes daring you to act. How sure are you that it isn’t your own heart you’re squeezing? You are so close, but so tired. Your heart beats in your chest like it could burst, the slightest pressure from your gauntlet. Your master’s is steady. He is always steady, a grave constant for your foolish spirit to follow. If he told you to let go, would you? If you let go, would you kill them for him? Your friends, and those dear to them. Their blood on Varric’s floor. Could he put a bolt in your back before you turned?

“Fenris,” he gurgles, and your hand shakes.

A hole in a single room, you think. Press down with your thumb, and it ends.

Danarius’ breathing is tight and labored, as familiar as your own. His heart beats against your hand, promising to dog your steps as long as you draw breath. _Is this your new master?_ It won’t end here. It won’t end.

“Stop,” your sister says, low and begging. “Leto, please.” You remember her. You remember the gifts, when she disappeared for lessons. There was no Hadriana until she left. She could have been Hadriana, her slippered foot pressed to your throat when you were already down and bleeding. You can hardly believe he honored the boon, to lose such an advantage over you.

“Yes,” Danarius chokes, “fierce little Leto, dancing with knives on his arms. All I did was improve upon what was already there. Come back with us, let this foolishness end.”

His eyes are warm in a way you did not see often, remember now when you were still a child. You were good, you played only when you had finished the work. You took any extra work they gave you, and he would smile with those eyes. Your mother would have fresh bread for you both each morning, her calloused hands catching as she smoothed them over your hair. He could be kind, the eyes say. He could be kind to you again. The knife slides hilt-deep at the base of your skull and splits you into halves, has you struggling and pinned by its point.

The ache in your throat guides you: your hand shifts higher, closes inside the muscles of his own. His pulse is faster now, weaker, and his breath cuts entirely. Panic crawls into those eyes, and he has no voice to command you. “You are no longer my master,” you growl, tearing his throat open as you toss him onto the floor. Varania wails, but you do not turn on her yet, sucking air through your teeth and willing the pain to ebb and flow from your splitting head.

If it isn’t true, at least he won’t live to see it.

-

Your fault, she says. One final wound with her life in her hands and her hands on the door. You fought for it, you asked for it.

“Freedom was no boon. I Look on you now and I think that you received the better end of the bargain.” Her eyes, the only color you share, sadden under her thin brows. “You took him from me, then and now. I had to go to the alienage with mother. I had to fight for food and work, fight for one room to ourselves. I could have been something. I could have had my life back. You killed so many for your markings: I would have paid any price.”

Her hatred licks at you like black flames, like the tongues of snakes. It is hot and cold, it is compacted like the dirt of Lowtown’s streets. Your sister lives, and you are still alone.

-

The crew leaves for breakfast in shifts. When the second group of men slope their shoulders weary down the stairs, you look to Hawke, not asking if he’ll follow. He doesn’t move. You can neither fault his shaking head nor protect him when Isabela turns her attention from Merrill. He’s a grown man—you might not have said it when you first met, or any day after, but here he is. Weary and weathered against a ship’s cabin, slumped heavy in his light armor.

You remove the gauntlet from your left hand, the one you can still raise above your waist. His hair is thick with oil, his skull peppered with dry blood and dirt. He leans into your touch with his eyes closed. It is so unlike that night in his courtyard, you wonder why you didn’t believe him capable.

“I could help your sister. When permitted, mages of the Imperium would draw power from my markings.”

Hawke lays his hand over yours, holding it against the side of his face. His beard is a courser version of his hair, equally soiled. It scratches your palm when he speaks. “I would never ask you to do that again.”

“I’ve seen where your decisions get me; I’ll be making my own from now on.”

“I look forward to it,” he murmurs, turning his head to kiss your palm. His mouth is chapped, hot and dry against your skin. His other hand settles on your waist, against the smooth coils of salt-hardened rope. “Fenris, I’m sorry. I—” 

“It is done. It doesn’t matter how you feel now.”

He lifts out of your grip, but you hold his hand firm against your side. “No more apologies, Hawke. From either of us.”

-

Isabela’s touch is like a spray of saltwater against your skin, fierce and bracing. Danarius made you bathe in it when he traveled, buckets tossed across your back on the open deck. To remind them your place, he said, after he let you feast at the head of his table, gave you a bed of your own in his cabin.

Isabela isn’t that. Isabela is the wash of waves over the boat’s edge, as the landing boat pulls away. Isabela is the tide coming up over your ankles, standing on the coast of Seheron.

On nights you cannot, as she puts it, _rise to the occasion_ , she sheds her tunic and holds you close under the blankets. Her thick, hot body touches the hollows of your own, but your markings flare in cool waves through the night. Sleep is beautiful and deep, a soft dream of her stomach and thighs. You still have them sometimes, oddly peaceful dreams of taking her in the afternoon light. Dust motes rising from the old sheets, her eyes smiling up at you, her breathless laugh.

There is so much to remember, even with all you have lost.

Hawke’s touch burns like alcohol in your throat. Hawke’s touch is always warm, sometimes sharp. In the courtyard, the night you disappeared from Hadriana’s lair with her blood still on your hand—he takes you by the arm and burns a hand print to your flesh. You turn on him like an enemy, and his surprise is no different, your strength underestimated. His eyes are dark and waiting, steadying under your stare.

It’s the lack of fear that makes you recoil, not the burn of his hands when he grabs you into the kiss. His hands are firm in the small of your back, spinning you and pressing you against the wall. It is everything you thought he’d never do, something breaking loose and licking the back of your teeth like a flame drawn out of his mouth.

You recoil again, leather scraping stone, and his hands go slack, slip down your hips. “Since the day I met you,” he murmurs, eyes so wide, so unchanged from the concern he’d worn out his door. He has carried his torch for years, and now he’s setting you alight.

The pain rolls your head back against cold stone. He kisses it, once, twice, earnest and terrible. It’s too fast, you can’t—

But he _waited._

-

“It feels like it ought have come sooner.” Your voice is pitched toward his chest, not for privacy, but for the warmth of his hand. The feverish pink of his cut brow. It prickles all over your skin, squeezing you inside of yourself tighter than any rope. This is what deciding feels like. This is what he has done time and again, while you watched. His hand tightens at your hip, shaking you just-so against his shoulder.

“This,” he asks, “or the Chantry?”

“No,” you answer. “You having to flee the city.”

“You wound me, Fenris. You truly do.”

You lean up to kiss him, guiding his chin down with your hand. He really is feverish, his sweat beading hot between tipped brows, but his lips curve against yours, and you drag him closer. He smells disgusting. He tastes like blood and smoke.

You decide.


End file.
